Hand-Clasp of the East and West

Hand-Clasp of the East and West is the family story of Henry and Martha Ripley, two Colorado pioneers who settled on the state's Western Slope. The book's description says they wrote under fictional, third-person names so that readers would get an "impersonal outlook of the Western Slope as a whole." Within that frame they set down their own family life alongside the history being made around them, and the description calls the result an accurate and engaging autobiography.

The full title of the first edition is Hand-Clasp of the East and West: A Story of Pioneer Life on the Western Slope of Colorado. The Mary Baker Eddy Papers project, which keeps a biographical entry on Henry, says the couple wrote it in their later years. Henry died a few months before it was finished, and Martha completed it and published it in 1914. Our catalogue lists the edition we carry as a 2008 Western Reflections reprint.

The catalogue gives two subjects, frontier and pioneer life, and fiction. The fiction label fits the invented names, though the description presents the content as autobiography.

This book belongs on the shelf of anyone reading about Colorado's Western Slope from the people who lived there. It is a first-person-turned-third-person family record, so it reads differently from a standard county history. Readers who follow the story of newspapers, farms and ranches in the region will see why the Ripleys' own record matters, since the Mary Baker Eddy Papers entry shows Henry working as a printer and newspaper publisher before the couple turned to farming and ranching. Libraries with pioneer life collections will find a source written by participants.